


Balance

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-20
Updated: 2008-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-25 01:50:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1625186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Occurs directly after 'Wizards at War'. In which there are alternate universes, labradoodles and Nitas.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Balance

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to my betas. 
> 
> Written for mirrorfour

 

 

> "With the tears running down his face, and grinning, Kit turned back toward his house to get his things. As he did, he saw someone standing at the end of his driveway, watching him, as if she'd known exactly where he'd be.
> 
> Laughing, he ran to meet her."
> 
> - _Wizards at War_ , Diane Duane 

What he didn't expect was the energy blast that almost got him in the chest. As it was, he'd been knocked right off his feet from the concussive force of the blast. Kit coughed once, trying to get his breath back. 

The neighborhood came alive with the snarling of all the dogs in the area, loud and terrible. Ponch crouched low in front of him, growling, _It's not her._ The air shimmered in front of them, hard enough to withstand a nuclear warhead.

He scrambled to his feet, "Neets, what the heck was that about?" His palms stung from where he'd hit the asphalt and his head was ringing from the howling of the dogs. Kit ran through a spell in his mind, letting the last syllable weigh heavily on his tongue. He didn't know what was going on, but he wasn't going to let her get a second shot in.

"Christopher Rodriguez." Nita sounded surprised. Her posture shifted and she looked uncertainly at him over the stock of what looked like a prop from a sci-fi show, all Lucite and blinking lights, incongruous against her worn jeans and blue, hooded sweatshirt.

She was standing on his driveway shooting people. Kit figured if there was anyone who had a right to be surprised, it wouldn't be her. "Neets, put the gun down."

 _You._ Ponch's hackles were up, and he looked ridiculously dangerous, shaggy sheepdog fur bristling in strange directions. _Where's Nita?_

"I _am_ Juanita Callahan." She aimed the weapon at him. "And you stink of the One." 

Kit smelled the ozone before he even registered that she'd fired. The shot had ricocheted off Ponch's shield but it had been strong enough to scorch the air and knock a mailbox off its post. He almost winced. His neighbors would be out here in a second he had to contain the situation before anymore property damage happened.

"Stop shooting at us, Neets!" He raised his hands to show they were empty, thinking furiously at Ponch. _If she isn't Nita, who is it?_ Nita took another shot, this time powerful enough that Ponch was thrown an inch back. 

She was testing how far she could push them, Kit realized. "I said stop!" He tried to touch her thoughts but her mind was a locked box. 

_It's not Nita._ Ponch repeated, then gave a full-body shudder, snarling. _She isn't from here._

Nita wavered slightly, "Not from here?" She narrowed her eyes and her gun holstered itself, folding into its body and disappearing at her side. "Explain." Without the gun she was misleadingly familiar, just Nita looking at him expectantly with her arms crossed. 

"He'll explain, but not here." He pulled out the transport circle that led to Nita's backyard. If anything, the Callahan's was still spelled to keep the neighborhood from noticing things like this. 

Things like this. God, Kit couldn't really wrap his mind around the situation he was in. He couldn't even begin to think about how he'd deal with his own family. Kit was surprised that Carmela wasn't throwing their door open to investigate.

"Where?" Nita asked.

"Nita's house." Kit paused, "or your house." he amended reluctantly. Kit brandished the transport circle. "You can check it out if you want." He dropped it around him and Ponch, and the swirling curves of the Speech fell neatly around his feet.

"I doubt _you'd_ know where I live." Nita eyed him from head to foot, "Wizard." She put a strange emphasis on the word, like it tasted unpleasant to her tongue. "But I doubt I'll be at a disadvantage wherever you bring me." She bit her lip and looked even more like Nita. 

Kit could have almost forgotten that she'd tried to blast his head off earlier. "If you know my name, you know that I can be trusted." Then again, he knew _her_ name and that hadn't gotten him very far.

"The Christopher Rodriguez I knew is dead." She shrugged as she studied the golden lines of the transport spell. "So, you might want to rethink that whole statement." Nita pulled a glistening strand off her wrist where Kit knew her charm bracelet ought to be. "My name."

It slid into its place and Kit didn't bother checking it. He'd seen enough to recognize the name for what it was, short and deceptively simple. Kit tied the spell with a hurried Wizard's Knot and at a word, the three of them disappeared from the street with a pop.

\---

"I was in a small battle, right in the middle of the Pacific Desert." Nita said as she fished another cookie out of the jar. "I had just gotten their general in the throat. And then I found myself here." She bit into it noisily. 

Now that Kit had gotten a second, clearer look at this Nita, she was thinner than his had been, unkempt and probably half-starved to death in the war that her world had been fighting for thousands of years.

Nita's dad had taken one look at her and known that she wasn't his. He was at the stove now, boiling pasta and stirring tomato sauce briskly. They'd called Tom and Carl but both wizards were at an important meeting out of ambit. Dairine hadn't even replied to the message he'd sent her manual. 

"Yeah, you keep saying that you _found_ yourself here." Kit refilled her glass with milk, "But that doesn't explain anything." They hadn't been able to find their Nita. The manual wasn't helpful at all, blinking that the only Nita it could find was this one. It _had_ logged a transport around the time that Nita had been replaced, but it had simultaneously gone both ways from coordinates that didn't make any sense.

"If I'm not mistaken I was lured here with the promise of _your_ explanations." She dunked the chocolate cookie into the milk and tossed the wet mess into her mouth. 

Ponch put his paw on Kit's lap, _I told you that you weren't in your universe anymore._ He looked as grave as a sheepdog could be. _We know as much as you do._

"In my world, Christopher Rodriguez was a traitor." She didn't look at Kit, focusing on detaching the top layer of the Oreo, "He wasn't my partner there, unlike your Nita and yourself, and I was the one who gave him back unto Death as it is my right."

Mr. Callahan put a plate of spaghetti down in front of her. "How is that your right?" 

Kit had to admire him. Nita's father had barely said anything since they'd arrived but everything he'd said had been calm and sensible. Then again, Mr. Callahan probably thought this was run of the mill wizardry stuff. His mama would have thrown a fit and a half if he'd disappeared and left a doppelganger in his place.

Nita dug into the pasta, "As the avatar of the Lone Power of the Earth, I am given all traitors and deal-breakers. Rodriguez had been working for the One the entire time he'd been fighting with us, a _wizard_." There it was again, the complete disdain she'd had when she'd said it earlier. 

Ponch growled from where he lay under the table.

Mr. Callahan stared at her, "The avatar of the Lone Power?" He looked at Kit sidelong before speaking again. "In our world, the Lone Power is the one fought against."

She continued after she swallowed, "In _my_ world, the One is the only enemy that humanity has." Nita wiped her mouth, "The One perverts the natural order by trying to extend lives past their due. They steal the energy of the universe to give their foot soldiers their so-called wizardry."

Kit stared at her, trying to understand what she had just said. "Wizards _preserve_ life. We don't steal our energy from anyone." He was getting angry just at the idea. 

"Energy is neither created nor destroyed." She said, leaning back into her chair. "It is transformed." Nita looked at him straight in the eye, "That, at least, ought to be the same here. There is a finite amount of energy in the universe and wizards harvest it to 'preserve' whoever agrees with their dogma."

"I've seen whole civilizations of sentient life forms sucked dry just so some chosen few get to live forever." She stopped eating, "It's all they do. We used to have oceans of water, all over our Earth. Scientists say that it wrapped around almost the entire thing, just one giant ball of water." 

Nita traced a noodle with her fork, "We don't have those anymore."

\---

"I'm sorry, Kit." Tom had said. His hair was even grayer now, curling over his ears. Beyond that he still looked the same, handsome like he'd stepped right out of a cigarette ad, but the lines on his face were grave and hard.

Kit couldn't remember the last time he'd seen him smile. And there was no reason to be happy, now that they were sure. 

The other Nita, as he had taken to calling her in his head, was pale but gaining some weight after weeks of good food and rest. "I can't go home." she said. The words sounded more final in her voice, like Kit could almost hear his Nita saying it, universes away.

Carl looked at her hard, like he was trying to find a trace of their Nita in that identical face. "Whatever pushed Nita out of this universe pushed you into it. We think that maybe one of the Nita's down the line, a fairly powerful one, initiated it."

"Nature dislikes a vacuum." Tom said, "And the one she left when she went to the next universe over pulled all of you forward." He scrubbed his face with his left hand. Both of them looked like they hadn't slept in days, dark shadows lay under their eyes. "And it seems irreversible."

She'd gone at that point, the air rushed into the space she'd left with a bang. The other Nita hadn't gotten the hang of her wizardry yet. Kit hadn't been surprised when she'd discovered that she had it; nothing could surprise him lately.

"Wizardry doesn't live in the unwilling heart," he said, "but for all that she hates it, it won't leave her." Kit got off the couch, dusting fake dirt off his lap. He hurt so much that he could hardly breathe past the throbbing in his chest. "I guess I'd better find her before Dairine tries to blow her up again."

Tom sighed, sounding even more tired than he looked. "I'm so, so sorry, Kit."

\---

"Tell me about Nita. Your Nita." They were sitting in study hall, going over their history notes. It was the only subject she had actual difficulty in. Science, math and english were all the same back in her universe at least. 

Kit stopped correcting her notes. "My Nita was very brave." He took a deep breath, dotting an 'i' with more force than necessary. "She liked lemon fizzy drinks and loved reading everything." 

He could feel her watching him, so he ploughed on ahead. "She hated being wrong. We would fight about the same thing for days before she admitted anything. She used to wear glasses. When we first met, she looked like a pair of glasses with a girl stuck underneath." 

Kit put the pen down before he snapped it in his grip, "My Nita loved her family a lot. But she once sent her sister's bed to Pluto for being annoying."

"Yeah, I get that." She sat back, pushing her chair away from the table. "Dairine looks a lot like our mother though." Nita drummed her fingers on her collarbone, "My mother's dead too. Died when I was born."

He felt a stab of sympathy for her, but mastered it quickly. "What about your dad?"

"I didn't know him very well. I left home when I was Chosen." Her voice was flat and emotionless, but Kit could remember how proud she'd been when she'd told him that the Lone Power had chosen her, wanted her above all the people in her world. She'd learned to be ashamed of it already, so few months after she'd arrived.

"Nita's parent's are great." Kit hesitated, "It's too bad you didn't get to know yours." He wondered if she ever brought things like this up when she talked to Millman. 

She went back to work, pulling an old exam closer, "Nita was very lucky."

\---

Dairine found Roshaun late in the next year. She'd brought him home one day, weary but ecstatic. He'd held her hand when she'd finally worn down and gone to sleep. 

"I heard. From Dairine." Roshaun didn't look any different from when he'd died, still regal and otherworldly without trying. But somewhere between Timeheart and living, he'd forgotten enough of himself that he found speaking hard.

"Yeah."

Roshaun touched his throat where the large, light yellow jewel glowed with its own light. "It is hard until it gets better." He stood up, looking embarrassed, "I'm going up now."

Kit watched him climb the stairs. Roshaun was wearing an old t-shirt of Mr. Callahan's over obnoxiously luxuriant trousers that shone in a spectrum that only existed in Timeheart. "It isn't unfair," he said to himself. 

The other Nita walked in from the kitchen. "Except where it totally is." She'd grown her hair out, long enough that it covered half her back. She said that it hadn't been allowed, back on her world. Her jeans were rolled up around her knees and her forearms were wet from washing the dishes. "Are you done with that glass?"

"Sure." He handed it to her, still half-filled with juice. "I don't like pineapple so much." 

She took it, "I'll remember that for next time." The other Nita rolled it between her palms a bit. 

Kit knew that when Nita looked like that, worrying her lip with her teeth, she was upset. He stood up and took it from her. "It isn't so bad, I guess." He took a big sip from the glass. "You aren't either."

The hand that took it from his looked steady enough. "Glad to know." She smiled like Nita at him, "I guess I'm growing on you. Kind of." She punched him on the shoulder a little too hard and went back into the kitchen to wash the glass.

\---

"I don't know why you can't just blow the bridge up!" She smacked the map. "If we take that out, they'll run out of supplies in half a week."

"What about 'I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way' don't you understand?" Dairine yelled. 

"More than you do about warfare!"

Kit wasn't going to get between them. The rest of the wizards had left a half hour ago. Only he, Roshaun and Ponch had bothered to stay when the war meeting had devolved into a screaming match. 

Roshaun was bouncing some of the soil on a rock for Ponch to follow. On the planet they were on, the soil was a non-Newtonian fluid that stayed solid only when force was exerted upon it. They'd spent two days on it so far, just shifting back and forth so that the very planet wouldn't swallow them up.

Two days of just fidgeting didn't do well for tempers. All throughout the small, floating encampment, everyone was engaged in at least one minor argument. The organisms endemic to the planet were more like giant, blue dishes than anything else, spreading their weight out evenly enough that they didn't sink. Bipedal morphologies just naturally failed at that. 

Kit sighed as Ponch jumped around barking, "Yayayayaya!" At least someone was happy.

Dairine threw her hands up into the air, "It is impossible to have a rational discussion with you." She stomped past Kit, "Call me when my _real_ sister gets back!" Spot hovered quickly after her. Its latest upgrade had crossed the line over from laptop to Star Trek.

Roshaun didn't follow immediately. "It was uncharitable of her to say what she said," he said quickly before he finally caved and walked into the flat underbrush behind Dairine.

Kit breathed in deeply steeling himself, and approached the other Nita. "Hey." It wasn't as though he thought she'd bite his head off so much as he rarely knew what to tell her when it came to Dairine. 

She was sitting on a block of hardened air, mouth pressed into a thin line. "Hey yourself." Her long hair was tied up and away from her face so that he could see the bites of the local insects. She scratched one absently before continuing to glare balefully at the horizon.

"She didn't mean it," he said. "You know how Dairine likes to run her mouth off." Kit sat beside her, bumping her shoulder with his own in what he hoped was a comforting manner.

"Yeah. She doesn't know when to shut up." She glanced at him quickly, "Your Nita must've been pretty lax on her or something."

He couldn't help it. Kit laughed and it echoed hugely in the semi-liquid environment. "Oh man, sometimes I want to see you tell Neets these things. Just to see her face." The idea of having his Nita back didn't burn as badly as it used to, but part of him still _hurt_.

She snorted inelegantly, pulling her leg up to rest her chin on her knee. He could tell she was having a hard time adjusting to the planet. The twin suns had burned her skin badly. He could still see the flecks of it peeling off her shoulders.

"You really should stop forgetting the sunblock at home." When he looked at her now, she didn't look anything like Nita, really. 

\---

"It's been a while since she's been gone." Nita's father was gardening, trying to take advantage of the early thaw to coddle his bulbs. He was taking the day off from work to attend their high school graduation. Kit had arrived, suit in hand, to pick her up and spotted Nita's dad in the garden.

"'Round five or six years." Kit said. It was five really, five and a half. He'd had a counter going in his manual for the first two years, floating over the words whenever he opened it. But he'd stopped one day, just because he could.

Ponch thrust his cold nose into his hand, _I think it hasn't been so bad._ He rolled onto his back and rubbed his fur into the new grass. _She's different. But good in her way._

"Yeah. She isn't so bad." He ruffled Ponch's new Golden Retriever ears. "Who's a good boy?" 

_You are._ Ponch smiled doggily, letting his tongue hang out in the breeze. _Kit is a great boy._

Mr. Callahan stood up, "No one could blame you for not waiting." He wiped the small set of shears he was working with on his apron. "I wouldn't think any less of you."

Kit's voice got stuck in his throat. He didn't know what to say to that. It was barely midday yet and the air was cool enough that it hurt his nose when he breathed. "I don't know if I'm waiting for anything." He wiped his suddenly sweaty palms on his jeans. "I thought I was. And then," he stopped. 

"And then?" Nita's dad was getting older, every day. Losing his wife had aged him badly, but losing Nita had hurt him even more. There was a stoop to his shoulders that never really straightened out anymore, and the furrows on his brow rarely disappeared. He pulled off his gloves and Kit could see a slight tremble in his fingers.

"If it were me, I wouldn't want her to hurt this long." Kit was nearly as tall as Mr. Callahan now. He'd hit a growth spurt around his sixteenth birthday and he couldn't seem to stop. He was growing so fast that his bones hurt, especially the last winter when the cold got so bad that he spelled himself warmer on some nights.

Nita's father smiled at Kit fondly then clapped him on the shoulder. "You've been good for her, Kit." The other Nita was waiting inside, probably trying not to listen in on their conversation while half-heartedly getting ready for the ceremony.

Kit held his tongue. He had missed Nita for as long as he could and though he'd thought of her as his, he'd lately realized that that wasn't completely true. 

He thought about the other Nita, _his_ Nita upstairs and said, "I want to be great for her, I think."

\---

"I've been thinking." She rolled around on the carpet. Ponch was tangled between her legs, happily washing her face. "Hey Pancho, off." 

_Fine._ He sneezed at her then scrabbled off to beg something off Kit's mama. _See if I save the world again next time!_

Kit looked after him bemusedly. "I think becoming a puppy scrambled his circuits or something." He sat down beside her and tried to turn the TV off. The TV cheerfully resisted and dialed the volume down instead. 

"Hey, it's not his fault he lost the last body." She swatted him on the head.

Ponch had gone on errantry with Darryl the other week. Kit hadn't really noticed since he was bogged down in the most grueling midterm exams of his life. He'd just assumed that Ponch wasn't walking over to the campus as much because of the bad hip he was developing due to the cold. 

What he didn't know was Earth's abdal and guard dog had had an intervention deep in the core of the planet. He'd only found out when a stray labradoodle puppy had let itself into his dorm room and eaten the chicken arrozcaldo his mother had sent him. Darryl had nearly died but Ponch had taken the hit instead. He was in his fourth body to date and it appeared to make him happier than the old one had.

Nita wiped her face on her t-shirt sleeve. "Anyway, I was thinking about what I'm going to be doing after we graduate."

"You're assuming we won't die of turkey overdose first." This was the first Thanksgiving they'd been able to get home and his mama had gone a little overboard with the cooking when she'd found out that Carmela was bringing Ronan over as well. The entire house smelled like roasting meat and the sweet smell of pumpkin pie. He sighed happily. 

She laughed and sat up, "Yeah, I had to argue my dad out of bringing another one. He wasn't happy about it, I'll tell you that. Dairine was relieved that they didn't have to suffer through another of Roshaun's 'attempts' again."

They both burst out laughing, remembering the never-ending trials Dairine had faced trying to get Roshaun to stop his affair with cooking. The last one had culminated a two-week microwavable dinner marathon.

"So what was it you wanted to do?" He wiped the his eyes on his jacket. "We've still got half a semester to go before they boot us out of NYU."

"You know I've gotten my advance from the publishing company?"

"You did?" He leaned back on the couch, too lazy to do anything else but flip channels. "I thought that was still coming in next month." Kit had just finished checking most of the problem sets for the class he was T.A.ing and he was just glad to have nothing to do for the rest of the weekend.

"So I got an apartment in the city," she said. "It was getting hard to explain all the visitors I've been having to my dorm mates." Her fingers were knotting the hem of her jacket. "And I was wondering if you wanted to move in with me."

Kit put the remote control down, gently. "Neets, are you asking me that as my co-Advisory?" 

"Kind of." She shrugged. "It worked out for Tom and Carl." Her shoulders were drawn up tight and she was looking anywhere but at him.

They'd both been having more and more young wizards popping in and out of their dorm rooms than seemed normal. He'd given up explaining them away as cousins and just told the repeat visitors to try to practice their invisibility spells more. 

An apartment _would_ solve that problem. And it wasn't as though they didn't spend most of their time out of classes together. But he knew that it was right to hesitate.

"I still haven't found a job yet." He was still waiting on three companies. Kit was hoping to get into the second especially. Engineering was easy beside most of the stuff he'd done on errantry in high school and he was pretty sure that he was a shoo-in for the stuff he'd applied to. "And kind of doesn't really cover much ground, Neets."

"I know that." Nita said before grabbing the remote control from him and putting it on the cartoon channel. "And 'I still haven't found a job' doesn't really sound like no either."

"You're right, it doesn't," he agreed. Kit put his arm around her shoulders, "I guess it could be worse. Oof!"

He kind of deserved that elbow to the gut.

\---

Kit walked up to the front door, trying not to drop the gigantic bag of Thai food. _Hey, you mind?_

The door swung open obligingly on its elderly hinges. _Not at all._

 _Thanks._ It tried to shut quietly behind him. He really had to oil that door before it started to get cold. Ponch kept nagging him about it every time they stepped out in the morning, but he always forgot when he got home. "Neets?"

"Pad Thai and no one gets hurt." She came out of the kitchen with both their glasses of soda. Nita looked exhausted, her sweats half-falling off. She nudged the pile of magazines off the couch and fell onto it, momentarily sinking into the sagging cushions.

Kit rolled his eyes and sat beside her. "Here you go. Pancho home yet?" 

"Out of ambit." She grabbed the plastic container from him, ravenous. 

He let her shovel a few bites in before settling himself. Kit felt his shoulders finally relax. It was getting a bit hard to move his neck in extreme directions and he was beginning to wonder if it was his increasing age or just too much time bent over his drafting table. 

"So, _after_ I finally finished writing the chapter I had due last week," Nita said when she came up for air, "Tom called looking for you." 

He swallowed a shrimp whole. "Called, or _called_?" They'd finally gotten the computer and TV to allow the telephone to do a wizardly version of the video calls that were getting popular now. Dairine had been in charge of beta-testing both kinds. 

She was working for NASA and happily destryoing scientific paradigms while Roshaun reluctantly continued reigning back on Wellakh. He'd been after her for years to finally come back and be crowned Queen, but Dairine was fully invested in her last project, holographic calls that ran solely on science. 

There hadn't been any Star Wars back on the Earth Nita had come from, so Kit had generously taken it upon himself to remind Dairine that she was still a runt that slept in Darth Vader pajamas. 

"Just called. Said he'd email you some specs about a project in the Crossings. No big deal actually. Just Sker asking for a consult." Nita passed him his glass before he asked for it, "And your mama wanted to remind you that Carmela's due in three days."

Kit groaned. "Do we even have a gift for that yet?" He toed his sneakers off and put his feet up on the coffee table. "Do they even know what sex it's going to be?"

"I got them a certificate for a year's supply of diapers last week." Nita shoved him in the knees. "Off the table." 

"You know she's going to be upset if we don't bring a stuffed Pokemon or something." He rearranged one of his legs underneath him. "Something from the early thousand. 'Mela likes that batch the most." 

"Gotcha."

They sat in a companionable silence, just eating their dinner. Kit was trying to see if he could remember past the 400th Pokemon but he was finding that being young, twenty-four, and well-versed in the many declensions and ascensions of the Speech didn't do anything for memorizing those creatures. He lifted Nita's glass and put an old CD underneath it to protect the coffee table.

"Kit?" 

"What?" 

Nita put her container down. "This is going to come completely out of nowhere," she said. "But I think we have to talk." She was fidgeting, twirling her plastic spoon on her thumb. Nita had finally grown her hair out again after spending two years with it cropped short. 

Kit was suddenly reminded of when she had still been new to the world. "Should I start packing or something?" He hadn't wanted her then, missing Nita so much that he could scarcely see straight. But somehow it had come out okay.

"We've been living in each other's pockets so long that I forget sometimes." She looked wary about bringing it up, but she pushed on. "I'm not complaining or anything. But I figure we're getting to the age that you can stop now." Nita rubbed her sleeves up and down her arms.

He stared at her, not comprehending what she was saying. "Stop what?" Heck he'd been _joking_ about having to move out. 

"Taking care of me." She looked him in the eye. "If you're going to stay, if this is going to continue, it can't be because I'm not your Nita." She scratched her eyebrow a little too hard. "I need to know if after all these years, I'm still just a placeholder for her."

Nita took his hand into hers, "It's a little late, but I need you to tell me."

Kit sat there, letting her hold his hand and trying to figure out what to do with his food. He settled on putting it on the coffee table. "Neets, she was my best friend-" 

She squeezed his hand, stopping him. "I know that. And I'm never going to be her." Nita bit her lip, "But-" 

"Let me finish." Kit looked at his Nita, "But you're _my_ Nita. And it's been that way for a while."

 


End file.
